Friday, August 28, 2015

Daniel Lopatin, the young man behind the spacey and spacious
mindscapes of Oneohtrix Point Never, operates out of a cramped bedroom in
Bushwick. Most of it is taken up by vintage Eighties synthesizers, rhythm boxes,
and assorted sound-processing gizmos, plus a gigantic computer monitor. Every inch of surface area is covered with tsotchkes: a Tupac mug, little sculpted owls, John and Yoko
kissing on the sleeve of "Just like Starting Over". Besides the computer, a stack of tomes
represent upcoming areas of research for the erudite, philosophy-minded
Lopatin: a guide to Alchemy &
Mysticism, a lavish book on ECM Records, Ray Kurzweil on The Singularity. Most intriguing, though, are the notes posted
above his work-space: maxims, self-devised
or sampled from thinkers, that are midway between Eno's Oblique Strategies and those embroidered homilies people once stuck
on their kitchen walls.

"Do More With Less (Ephemeralize)" is fairly
self-explanatory. The more opaque "'Linear' -- Kill Time vs. 'Sacred'" is clarified
by Lopatin thusly: "People think killing time is bad, you
should be productive --but when music is at its most sanctified, it's a total
time kill." There's something in Hebrew and Cyrillic that
nods to Lopatin's Russian Jewish background.
Most revealing of these "little critical reminders"
is "N.W.B.", which stands for
"Noise Without Borders". "Everything is noise," elaborates
Lopatin, whose yellowish hair and reddish beard mesh pleasingly with his off-purple
flannel shirt and kindly, dreamy green eyes. "Noise can be sculpted down
to become pop; pop can be sculpted down into noise. But it's also to do with
the idea of not having genre affiliations".

Oneohtrix Point Never emerged out
of the noise underground, but for a long while Lopatin felt like an outcast
among the outcasts. The ideas he was developing--bringing in euphonious
influences from Seventies cosmic trance music and Eighties New Age, creating
atmospheres of serenity tinged with desolation--went against the grain.
"My shit wasn't popping off at all", he laughs. This was 2003-2005,
when Wolf Eyes defined the scene with their rock 'n 'roll attitude. Lopatin and a handful of kindred spirits such
as Emeralds felt a growing "boredom with noise, a sense we'd done it: we get this emotion." Around 2006, the scene began to shift slowly in
their direction. "We were all talking about Klaus Schulze," he
recalls of the gig where he first bonded with Emeralds. He notes also the huge
clouds of pot smoke pouring from vans outside the venue, Cambridge, MA's
Twisted Village. "Drugs!" is
his answer when asked about how the noise scene reached its current ethereal
'n' tranquil state-of-art. "Noise, at the end of the day, is headspace
music. Drugs are a big part of getting into that experience, from a playing
side, and from a fan/listener perspective too."

A flurry of Oneohtrix releases plus collaborative side
projects such as Infinity Window made Lopatin a name to watch. But it was last
year's Rifts--a double CD for Carlos
Giffoni's No Fun label pulling together a trilogy of hard-to-find earlier
releases--that propelled him to underground star status. U.K. magazine The Wire anointed Rifts the #2 album of 2009. The CD also sold
out its two thousand pressing, making it a blockbuster success in a scene where
the majority of releases come out in small runs anywhere from 300 to 30 copies.
Riftswas further disseminated widely on the web, talked about and listened
to with an intensity that sales figures don't reflect.

Another profile-raising
"hit" for Lopatin was Sunsetcorp's "Nobody
Here"-- a mash-up of Chris DeBurgh's putrid "The Lady in Red" and a vintage computer graphic called
"Rainbow Road," that has so far received 30,000 YouTube hits. Lopatins calls his audio-video collages
"echo jams": they typically combine Eighties sources (a vocal
loop from Mirage-era Fleetwood Mac,
say, with a sequence from a Japanese or Soviet hi-fi commercial) and slow them
down narcotically (an idea inspired by DJ Screw). Lopatin collated his best echo jams on the recent Memory Vague DVD. His Eighties obsession also comes through
with the MIDI-funk side project Games, a collaboration with Joel Ford from Brooklyn
band Tiger City. (Ford also lives in a room at the other end of the Bushwick apartment).
Lopatin plays me a new Games track that
sounds like it could be a Michael McDonald song off the Running Scared O/S/T and says "We want people to be playing this in cars."

In what is simultaneously a
further step forward and another step sideways, the new Oneohtrix album Returnalis released this month on the highly respected experimental
electronic label Mego. Although
Lopatin's preoccupations with memory are similar to the label's most renowned artist
Fennesz, sonically Returnal has
little in common with Mego's glitchy past.
Yet Returnal is a departure
for Lopatin, too. Several tracks adhere
to the classic OPN template established by tunes like "Russian Mind' and "Physical Memory": rippling
arpeggiations, sweet melody offset by sour dissonance, grid-like structures struggling
with cloudy amorphousness. But the most exciting tunes are forays into
completely other zones.

Opening with the sculpted
distortion-blast of "Nil Admirari" is a fuck-you to those who have
Lopatin pegged as "that Tangerine Dream guy". It's also a concept
piece, a painting of a modern household, where the outside world's violence
pours in through the cable lines, the domestic haven contaminated by toxic
data: "The mom's sucked into CNN, freaking out about Code Orange terrorist
shit, while the kid is in the other room playing Halo 3, inside that weird Mars
environment killing some James Cameron-type predator.""
At the opposite extreme, the title track is an exquisitely mournful ballad
redolent of the early solo work of Japan's David Sylvian. Lopatin's vocals have
featured occasionally before as Enya-esque texture-billow but never so songfully
as on "Returnal" (qualities that emerge even more strongly on the
forthcoming remix/cover voiced by Anthony Hegarty).

Finally, most astonishingly, is "‡Preyouandi∆",
the closing track: a shatteringly alien terrain made largely out of glassy
percussion sounds, densely clustered cascades fed through echo and delay. On
first listen, I pictured an ice shelf disintegrating, a beautiful, slow-motion catastrophe. This "blues for global warming" interpretation
turns out to be completely off-base, but "‡Preyouandi∆" is the sort
of music that gets your mind's eye reeling with fantastical imagery.

Both "Returnal" and "‡Preyouandi∆"
contain textural tints that explicitly echo the hyper-visual sounds and
visionary concepts of Jon Hassell, who back in the 1980s explored what he called
"4th World Music": a polyglot
sound mixing Western hi-tech and ethnic ritual musics. "I wanted to make a world
music record," says Lopatin. "But make it hyper-real, refracted
through not really being in touch with the world. Everything I know about the world is seen
through Nova specials, Jacques Cousteau and National
Geographic." He explains that
the stuff that indirectly influenced Returnal
were things like the unnaturally vivid and stylized tableaus you might see in that
kind of documentary or magazine article--a 100 Sufis praying in a field, say. "So I'm painting these pictures, not of
the actual world, but of us watching that
world."

Sunday, August 16, 2015

The mystery-shrouded artist known only as Burial is affiliated to the dubstep scene, a sister-genre to grime that this year looks set to eclipse its waning sibling. Running in parallel for the past half-decade, both these London underground sounds rely on the same pirate radio infrastructure and share a common history in UK garage and jungle. But dubstep is a largely instrumental style bigger on mood than on personality (no shouty MCs here). It's also a site-specific music, its bass-heavy menace achieving full impact only through a massive sound system in a dark, crammed club. Burial's self-titled debut is the first record from the scene to transcend that context. Its evocative atmospherics and enfolding ambience make it a perfect lose-yourself soundtrack for headphones or lights-low living room listening.

'Distant Lights' blueprints the basic Burial sound: an ominously amorphous bass-rumble and a frantic-yet-subdued two-step beat are countered by the slow-motion mournfulness of the track's other elements, a yearning vocal sample and a reverb-blurry trumpet, like Kenny Wheeler wilting in a Temazepam swoon. Titles such as 'Night Bus' pinpoint Burial's subject as the melancholy and anomie of city life, while 'Southern Comfort' localises the vibe further to south London. But the feeling this music creates - imagine the Blue Nile circa 1989's 'Downtown Lights' but with the euphoria turned to sorrow - is something any metropolis-dweller anywhere on the planet will understand: sensations of grandeur and possibility battling with desolation and entrapment.

There's a simmering, suppressed violence bubbling inside Burial's music which conjures images of a city full of damaged people ready to inflict damage on others. But there's also a hovering grace and tenderness that makes me think of Wim Wenders's film Wings of Desire - a quality that emerges most clearly on 'Forgive', a beatless ache of sound threaded with the sounds of cleansing rainfall.

This album actually comes complete with a concept (it's a sound-portrait of a near-future south London submerged under water, New Orleans-style) while the most compelling readings of its theme hear it as a requiem for the lost dreams of rave culture. But the non-specific sadness that shimmers inside this music ultimately transcends attempts to pin it to a place, period, or population.

You can imagine Burial's tremulous poignancy reaching out to hurt and heal all kinds of listeners - fans of David Sylvian and Harold Budd, Massive Attack and Boards of Canada, Radiohead and Joy Division. This music can go far.

Burial

UntrueHyperdub

Blender, 2007by Simon Reynolds

Enigmatic British producer Burial doesn’t make dance music
so much as music inspired by dance
culture. His fidgety, clacking beats mimic the hyper-syncopated bustle of
styles like UK
garage, but he's more concerned with heartbreak than booty-shake. The
Burial sound taps into the sadness secreted at the heart of the nightclub
experience, the way feelings of blissful dancefloor community give way to the
poignant comedown of heading home alone in the cold gray light of dawn. Influenced by the painfully ecstastic
soul-diva loops of Nineties rave, Untrue uses sampled voices more
prominently than last year’s self-titled debut. But only “Archangel”
gets anywhere close to being an anthem. Instead, the album works as
an ambient whole, its fog-bank synths, yearning slivers of vocal and stoic
basslines filling your room with cinematic melancholy. Shrouded in crackle and
condensation, Untrue is like the “lost like tears in rain,” dying
android scene from Blade Runner, looped for eternity.